Selling with insights: prove you understand what your customers want and need

We're in selling with insights, proving that you know what customers want and need. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, so I'm very excited about this. When I saw the rehearsal, it's gonna be great. So who is doing the presentation?

 He's right over there. All the people in the front row are his team, except for her. She's not. But, anyway, so this is today's gonna be brought to you by Ty Griffin, the head of design at Alchemy Technology.

 And who is Ty? Let me tell you a little bit about him. He's got over twenty years experience in UX design. He's led successful design and research initiatives across various industries, not a one trick pony.

 Currently, serving as the head of design for Alchemy, a fintech company where he's driven user experience transformations, and he's passionate about fostering research and data driven design cultures. And he has experience optimizing design process and fast run companies. Enough from me. Let's hear from the man himself, Ty Griffin, everybody.

 What's up, baby dolls? Ready to do it. Ready to do it. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone.

 I'm Ty Griffin. I'm glad to be here today. And I wanna take some time out to share a little bit about myself and a little bit of conviction of my journey at the end of the day. So I know the title says selling with insights, but I really wanted to use that title for us to really take that internally and think about how do we sell ourselves and how do we take those insights and really get to know who we are at the end of the day, how we can navigate our organization and leverage the opportunity of selling with insights.

 So a little bit about myself. Like, as I said before, I'm head of design at Alchemy Technology. And so, some rules here I wanna set. First of all, I'm not gonna come up here and act like I'm this big honcho dog.

 I have a high school diploma, and I'm a really simple guy down to earth, and this is the tallest I've ever been in my life.

 So so I'm really excited. It's funny because it's kind of like now I know that tall people can see my scalp because I can see yours at the end of the day. So, just, all you tall people, when you're looking at people as you're talking to them, just look at their scout. Right?

 So anyway. So I'm really excited to be here. So what I wanna do is share a little bit about my journey, as as head of the designer to alchemy. It's a very interesting one.

 And I just wanna really have a conversation and relate, with you guys here at the end of the day. So I joined Alchemy about three and a half years ago. It was a big opportunity for me. I had nine interviews for this job opportunity.

 Nine interviews. And I was in the middle of building a house, so I took all of my in interviews in the apartment apartment bedroom closet. Right? And so it was really interesting because as I went through the interview process, after twenty years of that experience, I actually realized how to navigate the interview process.

 And every single step of the way was a different persona.

 So in the first phase, I got on the phone with the designers.

 And when I interviewed with the designers, I said, yeah.

 Those engineers just don't understand.

 Right? Then I got on the phone with the engineers and I said, those designers, they just keep iterating and iterating. They're like, yeah. Right?

 You know, and the product team got on the phone with the product team. I said, yeah. Designers wanna be all fancy and all these bells and whistles, and they just think, you know, they're just from they just wanna make it pretty. We need to get out the door and get conversion rates.

 Got the job at the end of the day. Right? And so the idea was I was always playing to the room.

 Right? And my whole goal was to play to the room and understand who's in the room. And I wanted to relate to the people in the room at the end of the day. That's what they were looking for.

 Before anything, they wanted me to relate to them. So my message has to become behind me being relatable. And so I'm gonna share my journey here, but I'm gonna tell you a little bit about Alchemy. So Alchemy is a, is a is a mobile banking platform that's provided to financial institutions.

 We have over eighteen million users on our platform today, and we support over two hundred and eighty financial institutions here. So it's more like a b to b, b to c, company. The cool thing about working at Alchemy is you have to actually sell the person that's cutting the check, but deliver the experience to their end users.

 So So I'm a kinda say that again. I have to sell the experience to our clients who are cutting the check, but build experiences for their end users. And so before they cut that check, they wanna be confident that I'm going to deliver to them a great user experience.

 And so when I joined Alchemy, I was really excited, and I, you know, I got a new office. They gave me a corporate card, and I had a new team. I was like, wow. I have arrived.

 I was really excited. My boss came into the office. He said, oh, Ty, real quick. I forgot to add one thing to the job description.

 You're gonna have to go out with the sales team and sell UX.

 And I was like, sales? Oh.

 Right? I was like, woah. Okay. So I said, I'll just jump on a sales call, and I will, see how this goes.

 So, one of our designers, existing designers, was on the sales call, and the sales team of the client was on the call as well. And I'm just listening along. The designer comes on. Like, the designer starts talking about how we have this thing called the thumb zone.

 And I'm going the thumb zone, and he's talking about affordance and guidance colors to the client.

 And I'm thinking, this is going right over the client's head.

 They don't wanna look dumb, but they don't know what the heck he's talking about at the end of the day. Right? And so I was like, this would this this is going right over their head. I really don't under.

 This is not user centered. It's not founded in the principles that I've learned over my twenty years. I don't know how I'm gonna do this. And so the SVP kinda just put me on the spot on the call.

 I was like, Ty, can you chime in and tell what you think about user experience? And I was just like, woah.

 I just got here. I don't have any vision, direction. I'm trying to figure out what's going on.

 So I was kind of stumped a bit. I spent twenty years of my career doing UX and research, and I said, selling UX?

 So I went home to my wife and I said, you know, babe, I'm I'm excited about this job.

 And, but there's one thing, this selling UX, it's like they want this kinda gimmicky concept. They wanna throw out these big words and like, doesn't make I don't know how to do that. I just don't know that. I'm I'm not you know, I'm not cut from that cloth. I don't understand that. And what she said to me was, they hired you for a reason.

 And I thought about that, so I said, who am I?

 And one thing I knew that I was good at was educating and simplifying.

 I was very good at educating designers on UX from all different backgrounds and simplifying.

 So I said, you know what? I'm gonna do just that.

 So I started to put a deck together, and I started to teach the basics of UX, UI design principles, and things like that. Super simple. Super basic. I'll show you an example of it here. I'm gonna skip through these slides because I wanna get right to the point here.

 Right here.

 Basic and simple.

 Our clients didn't know UX.

 So I said, space, it makes it easy for you to scan the page.

 Hierarchy draws the user's eye in the right areas at the right time because from the research data, we realize people understand their bank accounts based off the balances, not the account names.

 White space makes it legible, and it makes the conversation simple. Minimalism on the page keeps things simple. In some areas, we can use search icons where which are global signifiers.

 But in other areas, we had to co we had to show account details because there was no icon that represented show account details.

 Then I said, hey. Typography, large clean fonts. I knew the demographic was older for credit unions. I was on a call with a credit union.

 The average age is about forty two. So I said, large, clean fonts, really easy to read, high contrast as well. Like, think about it. You know, on this page here, there's really two visual stories going on.

 At the very top is where the user is today, and at the very bottom is a historical view of how you've gotten there. And that contrast on the page separates those two conversations.

 And the quick call to action buttons right there in the middle are positioned contextually to the actual impact that you're gonna have to that dollar amount that you see with those big letters.

 And they all got it.

 It was so simple. Now at that point, I created a level of, credibility.

 And the credibility came in with, wow.

 I got that. That was simple.

 So the relatability first was to understand the people in the room, then I had to come and meet them where they are. I had to show them a level of credibility. Didn't use big words, big concepts, scores.

 I stayed away from that. Once I had their attention, I had the level of credibility at the end of the day. K?

 So today, I'm really excited to say, I spend sixty percent of my time on the road with clients as head of design. And it has allowed me to really get a true understanding of what our clients want. And that's really where we need to go at the end of the day is getting in front of the client. K? So we wanna transition our careers from not just being on a computer or in a lab, but actually out there in front of our clients.

 You see, the cool thing about that, if you have that opportunity is the voice of the client is the biggest voice in the room at the end of the day. And so if you're representing that and have a part a part of that or have a say in that, then your voice becomes bigger.

 And I realized through this journey of mastering the ability to sell UX was I was using visibility, credibility, and relatability to make it happen.

 K? And so I'm gonna kinda break these down. But once again, visibility, I had a platform and opportunity to get in front of the clients by having to work with the sales team.

 The credibility was me having the ability to simplify the conversation.

 I gained a level of trust.

 The relatability was was for me to understand a room and meet people where they are. You don't have to be complex to understand UX and research at the end of the day. And so these were the three things I was working on. I'm gonna dive a little bit deeper into visibility and how we should think about that in our careers and how we sell ourselves to really drive, you know, our practice within these organizations.

 Visibility is critical. And sometimes we look at visibility as the opportunity for us to have an opportunity to share what we do and bring that to the table.

 And that thing we call the table is actually where the business happens, where the the big KPIs, where the the needles need to be moved, where the CEOs looking for performance and outcome. That's the table.

 But what I realized is I didn't take all of my UX jargon and things like that and say, boom. Guys, this is important.

 I masked it all away. I hid it. I put on my tie, my business suit, I walked up to the table, and I just listened to them.

 I didn't come through the door with UX and research and data at all. I came through the door and I said, I'm gonna get an understanding of what's important to you guys, and I'm gonna learn how to speak your language at the end of the day. Okay?

 And so the ability to come through the door and not bring all of that information and data to overwhelm people who goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's important. Then you walk out the room and go, we have other things to do. You really wanna mask that. So visibility what I'm saying here is visibility comes in different ways.

 K? The opportunity to be a part of a project that has nothing to do with UX or research.

 It puts you in the right room with the right people with the right opportunities to have the right conversations and build the right relationships.

 Because at the end of the day, people are looking at who you are before they decide how much they're gonna listen to what you have to say at the end of the day. Right? And so visibility, my boss didn't realize how much visibility he gave me. Because at the end of the day, I was able to actually go to clients and go, you know, I have a transfers concept that my team did a lot of research on, and we feel really confident about it. He went, just take a just take a look at it.

 And a client goes, oh, this is nice.

 And we put in a prototype demo. I knew it tested well already. Our researchers had done their due diligence on it. And I said, as a matter of fact, take a look here.

 We we did some user research on it. Look look look at these scores here. Yeah. I really like that.

 Then they got said, you know what?

 We like to sign a deal with you guys, but we want that feature if we sign a deal.

 And so I said, uh-oh.

 I have the client's ear now.

 And so my boss gave me more visibility than he realized.

 Because now as I was I was in a position to where I could get straight to the client, get their buy in. And once the client say they wanted it, the business follow at the end of the day. So when you think about visibility, think about it from a standpoint of just opportunities to be in the right place, in the right room, and don't even show up with a, you know, with a with a title on. Show up as an individual within the organization that's trying to understand the big picture and bring value to the organization in its most simplest form.

 Then you have credibility.

 We work on credibility every day. Work on our craft, our practice.

 We read. We do research.

 We collect data and information.

 But I wanna speak from credibility from a standpoint of being credible to where people wanna listen to what you have to say.

 Right? And so credibility from a standpoint of I actually had one of my, lead researchers actually I said, your goal is to go around the organization and just build relationships. Work on any project you wanna work on at the end of the day. Right?

 And so a conversation that I had yesterday with our chief marketing officer, I said, hey. You know? I'm up here at user testing dot com, and, we're probably up for a renewal. And so they're wining me and dining me, and then they're gonna bring me in the back room and slap me with that sticker price.

 So but I like it, though. I'm good.

 So I'm having a great time. So she goes I go, would you like to have a user testing seat? Because I think the new model we're going with, it may open up the seats, and that'll give the marketing team an opportunity.

 I'm not selling UX. I'm building a relationship. I'm saying, hey. I'm coming with offerings.

 That's all I came with. That was it. That was the nugget I was dropping was, hey. You guys wanna do some research and marketing? We have this great tool.

 I just came with that offering. I left it there.

 She came back later. She says, hey, Ty. Can I talk to you?

 We jump on a Zoom call, and she says, I think that's a great idea, but I wanna have another conversation with you.

 That was it.

 Right? That that that was it. It was I was coming with a love offering, but it it actually jogged the idea in her eye in her mind to say, hey. Ty, I wanna talk to you about something else. K? And so she says, we have thirty five clients that we've identified that are at risk of not renewing with Alchemy.

 Thirty five.

 And I need to get some information in front of them with our client success team that's gonna tell them the value that our platform adds to them as a customer.

 That's what she was looking for.

 And I go, I couldn't go into user testing dot com for that one. I could go into it for from a standpoint of user experiences.

 The conversation was bigger. She was looking for analytics.

 She was looking for how do we move the needle at the end of the day. Right?

 So that conversation was around telemetry data on the platform.

 Okay? And so the goal there was that I'm making about this conversation was it had nothing to do with UX, UI, and design strategy, but it was once again building the relationships.

 So we talked about how I can get telemetry data for those clients. And she said, oh, by the way, I've been working with your research team, and my gosh. They're so amazing.

 They're so amazing. Like, they they they did this. They did it was stuff I didn't know he did. I I didn't know he was doing it.

 Right? But it was building the relationships, and I was building that credibility. So now I have that conversation. I am confident that I can walk into our chief marketing officer's office and talk about UX and have her ear.

 That's the point I'm talking about when it comes to credibility.

 Then relatability.

 Relatability is the you know, it's it's really humility.

 It's meeting people where they are at the end of the day. Right? A level of relatability is, you know, there's these big slides with my big head face on here, and I'm standing on this big stage with these big lights. I can barely see you. Right?

 And so what that does is it makes it seem like I'm a expert in something. Right? And that you're supposed to listen. I'm supposed to talk.

 So the first thing I I I do is I come into the room and I crack a joke about my height. Right? To say, guys, I'm human. Listen.

 I got a high school degree. Right? I'm short. My wife thinks I'm tall. That's all I need.

 Right?

 She tells me every day. So it's the relatability of being human because I wanted you to hear me. I didn't want you to see me as this whatever because you see me on a on a brochure or whatnot. I wanted you to really hear the message. So walking into the room and creating a level of relatability is super, super critical.

 Alright.

 As you focus on VCR, visibility, credibility, and relatability, you have to package that up a little bit there. K? And you have to package that conversation how you move, and having strategic goals that are measurable and marketable. K? So once I've created that level of visibility, credibility, and relatability, and I keep throwing it out there, I had to package that up. And I started to have to have conversations that were number centric.

 I will work from the metrics and work my way back to UX and research.

 I would identify a number then work my back work my way back to the UX and research conversation. Once again, not coming through the door with it at the end of the day. And so measurable and marketable is how you're always gonna wanna think about how you navigate the organization.

 Your conversations need to be something about measurable.

 There has to be a a metric or a score that the c CEO cares about that's gonna change the stock price in your company, and we'll have your conversations there.

 Then being marketable about is finding a a tagline or a theme to get people excited about what you're talking about and have that message be marketable. You know, in marketing, there's always storytelling that goes on around it, and we hear a lot about UX and research how to tell a story.

 So telling a story is gonna be super critical as well. And so it's something you really wanna think about when it comes from a marketability standpoint of being marketable.

 You know, when I think about measurable, I think of, you know, client satisfaction, customer retention at the end of the day. We all kinda know those numbers at the end of the day. Right? But you also those things boil down into smaller numbers.

 You may find subsets of those values that you can focus on. Okay? And so being a hundred percent focused on numbers is gonna be critical. People are actually gonna build trust with you when you talk about numbers first.

 K? They're gonna build trust with you, especially when you're bring when you have a seat at the table, and you're trying to drive value. It's all gonna be around numbers.

 Marketable is also gonna be who you are, how you show up at the end of the day. Can people put you in front of a client? Right? And so what is your brand? And so we always talk about how we how how there's a struggle. Sometimes there's a challenge going on with us getting our our our leadership to buy in to, you know, investing in UX and design.

 But the reality is we should probably focus on ourselves, and we should get to the positions where we have that visibility and credibility at the end of the day because you'll actually be heard different.

 I've said some of the same things in my career as a designer too. I say it today. People go, ah. Right? And so at different levels. And so I had to build those levels of credibility and relatability across the organization.

 Last but not least, as you think about how you build this, right, for yourself, you build this mantra of I'm going to be more visible.

 Right? I'm going to take on opportunities that allow me to just be visible in key areas, key projects.

 Invisible can also be physical, showing up. You know, today we're in a remote landscape, and so anytime there's an opportunity to show up to set myself apart, I show up.

 Right? And so that's another way to be visible. There's opportunities in going where people are not going, and that's to the office.

 So right? And so and then you think about the credibility factor of it all. And so the idea though is your message has to be packaged up, right, for, executive report at the end of the day. I wasn't really good at executive reports.

 I really didn't understand them. So I copy I copy some something from maybe one of my peers at the end of the day, and I would go, okay. This is what they did. And then I go, how do I make it simple though?

 See, he's too smart. He uses big words. Right? And he's too wordy as well. I can simplify that at the end of the day.

 And so that was my ability was when I come to the table, I was very much more concise.

 You know, I had I had data and information to back up some of my ideas, and I I was always packaging my message for an executive readout. See, what I realized is it's not that executives don't believe you in some cases or understand you.

 Is that are you coming with a solution as packaged for them to take your idea and present it to leadership?

 K? So when you walk into the room with a half baked idea and it's not thought through, they're going, yeah. I can see that. Right? But when you're able to package it all the way up and just hand it off, that's much more powerful at the end of the day.

 So today, UX shows up seventy two percent positive in our sales demo. You know, it's funny. They call me the Michael Jordan of UX at work. I'm not really tall, so I don't know where they get that from.

 So and I'm proud to say that we have been certified for an outstanding mobile banking platform experienced by JD Power. This was really big because you remember that chief marketing officer that I was talking about?

 Well, she called JD Power. Her and I worked together to be evaluated by JD Power, so we built that relationship.

 She convinced the CEO to spend two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to go through the J. D. Power certification.

 This logo is on every screen across our offices.

 If you go to alchemy dot com today, it is the first thing you will see on the website across the banner.

 UX is super important at alchemy. And so my ability to focus on elevating myself, not so focusing on my message, but focusing on positioning myself to share a message was super, super critical and to the success of, of my career and overall my team and the success at Alchemy.

 So the ability to sell you x through visibility, credibility, and relatability while identifying marketable and measurable message package for executive buy in is what I wanna leave with you today. So always be thinking about this word salad here of focusing in on that.

 I'd like to thank you for your time. I'm gonna open up the floor for any comments, questions, or feedback.

 Thank you. Hi. Thank you so much. This was very insightful.

 I also work for a company that does b to c via b to b. And I'm curious how you approach it when sometimes those businesses are out of touch with their end customers and dead set on an idea that you're like, that's really not gonna work for your end customers.

 We get that all the time. All the time. They think they know. Right? And so I'll do things like, can you share with me some of the data that you have that supports those findings?

 K. Or I'll say, I have data. I'm more happy to share my data. How about we do that?

 Right? Do you have to limit your data on your platform?

 We off we well, that's what I'm asking them. We we offer it as a SKU. You can actually purchase it, and then we can have an insightful conversation.

 I absolutely agree that it's challenging, but I just wanna get down to the core issues, right, at the end of the day. So I'm not deflecting away. I'm saying, I agree. Let's get to the point.

 Let's go find the data. That's a great question. And so getting them back to that data conversation at the end of the day, is where you wanna get them to. Every conversation is gonna stop with the numbers.

 There's two things I realized that actually will stop people in their tracks.

 A usability test where you see a user struggling and numbers on the platform.

 Those are the two things that will stop executive and product owners in their tracks to go, oh, I gotta rethink I gotta think about this. So my sales demo, a key part of it, I go, what people say, think, do, and feel are sometimes four different things.

 Then I pull up a demo of a actual user testing, video, and I play it back to them. And I ask the user the question in different ways, and the user contradicts themselves.

 Right? And he says some one thing from a qualitative perspective, but he does another thing from a quantitative perspective. And so those insights start to build that credibility and then open up the conversation for you to have that conversation that you truly wanna have with those individuals.

 Alright. Anyone else with a question?

 Come on. Don't be shy. Back it.

 Just two quick questions. You had mentioned something in one of your slides about working on nine UX projects. I just wanted to know what those entail. I'm sorry if you mentioned it. I missed it. And then the other one is, you know, we're a very, very heavy qualitative team.

 Just the way the company is structured, we don't have a lot of access to metrics. We're trying to get more of those.

 But, you know, things that might seem like quant quantifiable data, time and task success rate, we also don't use. We really do observations and quotes and feedback with limited pools.

 How do we, from your opinion, how how do we best communicate insights with smaller pools to teams that are very heavy with quant metrics without being heavy quant data specialists.

 Okay. So my dyslexia is challenged by your question, so I want you to can you give back to them? I want you to simplify that question if you can for me.

 Sure.

 How do you convince stakeholders you mentioned that you you kept mentioning, you know, numbers, data are very important as well as showing them clips and bringing those two together.

 If you have limited access to to some of those numbers, for instance, what is the best way to give weight to your qualitative studies? Gotcha.

 Okay. Thank you. So limited access to those numbers, that's a that's a challenge. That's a true challenge. And I don't know. A lot of people are thinking about that in here. Right?

 You're honestly, it's gonna be hard to get access to that if you're not at the table, if your if your design team does not have leadership as reporting into the c suite. And that's that's where the challenge is coming in. I do have access to that information. And so the reason a little bit about this session is talking about getting to that position.

 So I'm not gonna kinda sell you on some type of framework that I think is gonna work on someone in your office to convince them to listen to you. I think it's gonna be more about creating more visibility and credibility and relatability within yourself and your team to get to those positions in the organization to where you do have access to that information. Because, honestly, you you won't get it. It's it's really hard to do. Sometimes they don't even have it. I'm just being a hundred percent transparent with you at the end of the day. But when it comes to stakeholders, try to impress the people they're trying to impress.

 K? So if a product owner is trying to impress their VP, listen to what their VP is looking for. Right? And so, for example, if you impress my wife, you impress me.

 You get it? So at the end of the day, you know, sometimes you you your message may not get through to that individual or those stakeholders, but those stakeholders are trying to impress someone by by moving a metric or change a number. And so always tie back to that thing that they're trying to impress or improve or bring value to is will be my answer to your question.